Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

Publicly financed stadiums, our new albatross

The National Post did a nice two-parter on stadium construction in Canada this weekend. Much as it’s a problem north of the border, I think we have it just as bad if not worse down here–Nick Gillespie at Reason did a great blog post on my hometown of Cincinnati and the struggles it is facing to come up with the money for the $1 billion it spent on new football and baseball stadiums last decade. $1 billion in a mid-size Midwestern city redistributed from taxpayers to team owners after the team owners threatened to pull up stakes…and we wonder why Cincinnati is in trouble.

The first National Post article is mainly a rundown of new stadium construction in Canada. Just about every major city is either building a new stadium or upgrading an old one. I can’t believe that my beloved Vancouver is spending $465 million to install a retractable roof on an already-existing stadium. You could build a whole new stadium for that much money! On the bright side, at least Montreal isn’t throwing any more money at maybe the greatest stadium boondoggle ever, the $1.6 billion, 30-years-to-pay-off Olympic Stadium.

“There’s no doubt that when you walk around [Toronto’s] Rogers Centre, you see a lot of economic activity,” he said. “But it’s not new economic activity. People have an entertainment budget, and all this does is concentrate that activity at one place at one time.”

Bingo! It’s just taking money from some restaurant and bar owners to subsidize business for restaurant and bar owners in another part of the city. They didn’t even cite one of the most damning stats of all, quoted in Gillespie’s blog post–that having a pro sports team in your area costs each person about $40 in yearly GDP.

I love sports. They’re the only thing I watch on tv. I’ve been to tons of games over the years, mainly because I was lucky enough to grow up around two pro sports teams in Cincinnati. But the sports fans of the world need to get together and say “no more.” Building new stadiums with more luxury boxes might lead to more revenue for our favorite teams and higher payrolls as a result, but these new stadiums are sucking our communities dry and pricing many fans out of attending at all. They also become big concrete monstrosities that spend the vast majority of their time unoccupied and take up valuable real estate in our downtowns. So enough is enough–read my lips, no new stadiums!